Revisited: Alan Wake

Our own Mat C reviewed Alan Wake in 2010, producing a definitive, thoughtful piece of work. I agree with basically everything he said and the way he said it, so I don’t mean to just regurgitate. Mat took care of a lot of the heavy lifting for me by doing the Reviewer’s Job; my intent is to look with the space of years, a platform change, and perspective between the game’s 2005 announcement, its 2010 self, and its now self. Alan Wake is an exceptional effort that could have been even better. Yet to reject it as just a missed opportunity is unfair. There’s more to it than what we got, but what we got is still a superb game.

And I made a video! You gotta watch my video. Click the button! CLICK IT!

Video work really isn’t for me – I enjoy doing it, but I’m obsessive about tiny things and wind up spending outlandish time fanatically tweaking meticulous crap unnoticeable to anyone but me. That’s the main reason this piece didn’t arrive five weeks ago.

Remedy Entertainment – the Finnish studio best known for Max Payne – is a cinematic developer often reproached for its focus on drama. The claim is accurate but unfair; it implies that gameplay takes a backseat, and I’ve yet to observe that in any of their work. It’s true that Alan Wake could readily have forgone practically all of the combat, environmental challenges, objective-driven progress, object searches, all the structured gamey stuff. It would have worked just as well as a movie or TV miniseries. But Remedy isn’t in the business of movies or TV, it’s in the business of games, and they took the time to make this one good.

Gone Girl

Being a novelist is a hard job – I know, I’m related to one. When most people think of writers, they conjure up established names like Stephen King or George RR Martin or Dennis Lehane. Those guys are outliers: long-time survivors whose every book is a bestseller. Rich and entrenched, mundanities like publisher deadlines do not affect them. But they are an infinitesimal minority. Most writers are workaday, living in fear of getting dropped by their publisher or losing their representation or failing to hit sales projections. Think of professional actors – for every “star” there are hundreds, thousands, who make a good living but never appear on Fallon. For them it’s the hope of glitz and glitter plus the reality of feeding their families with a skill that’s mercurial and often painful to have.

Ask Alan Wake. He has three or four bestsellers under his belt – that’s three or four more than many novelists will ever achieve. He’s on the brink of Being Somebody, but he’s not there yet. It could all fall apart in an instant, so when Alan is clotheslined by writer’s block, ruin looms all too real, and he’s helpless to do anything about it.

Insomnia creeps in as desperation mounts and the page stays blank. Like many creative types Alan has a history of substance abuse; nothing serious, just “enough,” and he starts medicating his inability to write or sleep with booze. Two years into the dry spell, he’s run out of grace from his publishers and the press. The strain is terrible; he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

His wife Alice suffers with him. The couple shares an intense love, the kind that leads to fiery codependent relationships and reasonably good video game plots. As wives go you can’t ask for a much better one than Alice Wake. She’s been patient, tolerating the drinking binges, the drugs, the depressive episodes, the moments of ego, the sometimes-deranged behavior. She understands the pressure he’s under and the helplessness he feels, but it’s all approaching a limit.

Thinking time off from their bustling Manhattan day-to-day will help, Alice arranges for a vacation to Bright Falls, Washington, a sleepy small town nestled in the vast dark forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Not without her own idiosyncrasies, Alice is crippled by nyctophobia. What a strangely humiliating thing for an otherwise functional adult, to be paralyzingly afraid of the dark. She is simultaneously mortified by and matter-of-fact about it, ashamed even around her husband but strict as a peanut-allergy sufferer about keeping those lights on. For some strange reason, despite this Alice has rented them a generator-powered cottage in the dark northwestern woods, perched on an island in the black caldera of Cauldron Lake.

The objective there says “Pose for Alice. That dude in the glasses is not Alice.

Upon arrival she shows Alan a surprise that predictably triggers one of his unpredictable rages. A brief one-sided screaming match and off he stomps into the night she fears so much. Seconds later his tantrum is interrupted by a shriek. By the time he races back, Alice is gone, having left behind nothing but a broken railing, a bloodcurdling scream, and a frantic husband who may be losing his mind to darkness far more chill and pitch than the icy, fathomless black water that laps at the shores of their little vacation island.

It’s not a lake. It’s an ocean.

House of Leaves

“What the hell does that mean, Steerpike?” you ask, but I won’t tell. Alan Wake is a menacing, unbearably tense psychological thriller piñata-bloated with all the best such an experience can offer. Darkness is a prevalent theme, because darkness conceals. Foes, dangers, the truth. Things lurk in darkness waiting to spring. Minds and people slip into darkness and are lost. Darkness conceals.

Your quest is to find and save Alice if you can, but don’t expect crystal clarity. This protagonist brings new meaning to the term “unreliable narrator,” as Alan’s brain, half-mad with stress and worry, begins to unhinge completely. He loses time like normal people lose their keys, often waking up miles (and days) from where he’d been a minute before. His consciousness twists and kinks, the barriers between dreams and reality crumble.

Charming Bright Falls and its primal forest become the setting of a man’s private nightmare. You find loose-leaf, manually-typed pages scattered from hell to breakfast, pages from an Alan Wake novel that Alan Wake never wrote. Finding them is crucial to preparing yourself for dangers, because whatever this book is and whoever wrote it, it’s the key. Or, y’know, a key, sprinkled out of order across miles of terrain. The book’s passages are just as likely to ramble about a park ranger’s secret crush on the waitress at the Oh Deer Diner as they are to divulge a clue of substance. Manuscript pages reveal events that won’t happen for days, and then happen precisely, word for word. Motivations of characters you haven’t met, kidnappers’ schemes, whispers of dark powers lurking in the town, and worse things too.

Worse things? What worse things? Where? OH, you mean us.

In the woods, the Taken set upon you: shadow-wreathed apparitions that appear to be locals. They jabber and mock, flitting like wisps and attacking with axes, shovels, chainsaws. Shine a light on them and the enshrouding darkness will burn away, leaving them vulnerable. Soon enough Alan finds a gun, but new horrors materialize relentlessly. Defeated Taken burst and evaporate, leaving behind no sign that they existed at all. Hell, maybe they didn’t.

Alan, wake up.

Women’s Murder Club

The mystery of Alice’s kidnapping deepens: there is no island. There is no cabin. There is no record of the Wakes coming to Bright Falls, nor does anyone remember seeing Alice. Sarah Breaker, Bright Falls’ young sheriff, is dually (and duly) sympathetic to Alan’s plight but cognizant of the Crazy Alarm blaring in her head. The hysterical Wake clearly believes his bizarre story, but his behavior is making things worse. Alan is actually kind of a douche. Even before Alice’s disappearance we note that he doesn’t appreciate his fame and is too quick to pull attitude or temper when things don’t go his way. He considers the possibility that he’s lost his mind, but won’t listen to the calming voices of those who try to help him. He’s selfish, arrogant, and entitled, dismissive of the townspeople and sheriff even as he demands their help, quick to call in New York powerbrokers like his agent for moral support, then ignoring them too. He revels in the “Virtuoso, Tortured, Artist-Turned-Tragic-Savior/Asskicker Victimized By His Own Brilliant Fiction” label while refusing to consider that it’s ruining him.

Basically, Alan Wake and Alan Wake are both very well written.

That’s Rusty, one of the park rangers. Don’t worry, he’s not doing anything weird to the dog. He’s just bandaging its paw.

Now, I must smirkily note that this story – the one about a Virtuoso, Tortured, Artist-Turned-Tragic-Savior/Asskicker Victimized By His Own Brilliant Fiction named Alan Wake – was penned by a dude named Sam Lake; I don’t know if he thought we wouldn’t notice that or what. A lot of Lake’s psychology is on full display in Alan Wake and honestly I think he should consider seeing a therapist. Münchausen-by-Histrionics isn’t uncommon among writers; instead I’m unnerved by the consistent presentation of violence against women in his work. It can’t go unremarked upon that this is very much a cornerstone of Lake’s writing. That the women in Remedy’s games are typically very awesome and strong doesn’t ameliorate the fact that many are also victims, and that swell but tormented men endlessly rescue, seek, aid, or avenge them. Lake and Remedy must be commended for regularly producing stories that other games struggle to manage; it’s disturbing that this one trope is something they can’t seem to get away from.

Money Shot

Remedy Entertainment is a huge favorite of mine on account of the Max Payne games. I love them. More than the gunplay and level design and nods to Hong Kong cinema, more than the noir stylings and Hammett/Chandlerisms. It’s where Remedy took it all, creating video game baklava, a tightly rolled sweet that indulges more than such a compact package should be able to.

So it probably comes as no surprise that Alan Wake was once a game I had been very excited about. When they announced it in 2005 I put it on my watch list sight unseen. A psychological thriller? You rarely see those in games. Intriguing, definitely a departure from the frenetic slo-mo gunplay of Max Payne, but still in the wheelhouse. A story about marriage, madness, obsession, terrible vacations, and the vagary of discernment? Count me in!

Alas that Alan Wake was doomed to suffer a tortuous development cycle, slipping again and again, repeatedly undergoing extensive structural overhauls and platform changes before finally kerplunking onto shelves in May of 2010. I hadn’t exactly lost interest in it by then, but I wasn’t in a rush to pick up a copy. Indeed, I remember passing Gamestop many times – there’s one on the corner like 35 feet from my house – thinking “I should stop and get Alan Wake,” only to drive on.

Its baffling press didn’t help. It was like everyone wanted to heap praise but had forgotten how. As if after so many years everyone had expected Alan Wake to be a bad game, and it wasn’t, but no one could decide how to reverse their predisposition. Nobody had serious complaints, yet the acclaim sounded reticent, faraway, delivered by someone who has only heard of applause and isn’t entirely sure they’re doing it right. The decision to make it a 360 exclusive drove away at least as many as the lacklusterly positive reviews, and an announced (but never executed) a la carte DLC monetization strategy pissed audiences off. On top of all that, its ship window was disastrously timed, arriving within days of Red Dead Redemption.

The combined result was that Alan Wake sold a dismal 45,000 units in its first month. At this point I stuck a mental fork in Remedy Entertainment. The small studio had always been ahead of its time, had always made great games, and had always stumbled for reasons that weren’t its fault. I just didn’t see them surviving a disaster of this magnitude.

Even the police have axes!

But Alan Wake continued to quietly sell, and people noticed. By December of 2010, as illustrious a publication as Time magazine had called it Game of the Year, gushing over its tight play, twisty, suspenseful plot, intense foreboding premise, stunning visuals, and outstanding small-town Americana. The game had a backbone, muscled with peerless technology and solid mechanics familiar to any Payne aficionado. The eventual release of a Windows version helped, and by the beginning of 2013 Alan Wake stood at well over two million units sold, making it a success, though hardly a blockbuster.

Dark Places

It wasn’t just the long wait that persuaded the inert ho-hummity of Alan Wake’s press and reception. Gamers who’d watched the title had a very valid reason to think they ought to have been disappointed by what they got. Let’s rewind to 2005, when Remedy was riding acclaim from the Max Payne games and seen as a bold rising star of the medium.

Into this critical landscape they announced Alan Wake, revealing a game design that seemed aspirationally in tandem with the developer’s evident skill and growing adulation-sourced confidence. Max Payne 1 and 2 were, ultimately, shooters; Alan Wake was unveiled as an open world – a game that looked like Max Payne but played like a nonlinear action RPG.

Remember now, we’re waybacking to 2005. Open worlds weren’t revolutionary – your Morrowinds and Arxes of the Fatalis variety were around. But shooters hadn’t made the sandbox transition yet and the lure of a gritty, character-driven mystery in such an environment was exciting. Plus, some of the stuff Remedy showed off was more than just innovative, it was groundbreaking.

They demonstrated reactionary AIs that responded dynamically to Alan’s behaviors and attitude, and a system by which weather, of all things, would guide the player away from areas he wasn’t ready for. When combined with Alan Wake’s premise, their day/night cycle put me in mind of Castlevania II – a game that pioneered the concept – in which the setting sun didn’t just bring darkness, it changed the nature of the world, transforming locals into fell spirits, altering the landscape and even the laws of reality… unless, of course, it was all only happening in the protagonist’s troubled mind. An action RPG sandbox set in and around a living town, with nonlinear activities and objectives, dynamic environments, and a dark, psychological, adult mystery with a dusting of horror – all this sounded too good to be allowed.

Not a shred of it turned up in the game that finally shipped.

Feature changes happen, but Alan Wake’s five year development saw it conceptually eviscerated in ways that far surpassed normal adjustments to scope. The Alan Wake that saw the light of day is an entirely linear, according-to-Hoyle third-person shooter without the barest vestige of sandboxery.

Fundamentally, the difference between “looks open” and “is open” is that one of them is open and the other just looks open. God-damned linguistic thaumaturgy right there.

Remedy says they ditched the open world idea because nonlinearity interfered with their story structure. This may be partly true, but I suspect there’s more. By 2010’s dawn, Alan Wake was stupidly overdue, and costing somebody a fortune for every day it stayed that way. By “somebody” I mean Remedy itself and its publisher Microsoft, which had once hoped to use the game as a showcase for the Windows Vista operating system but settled for making it a 360 exclusive when it missed Vista’s release by three years.

During the plodding eons of Alan Wake’s development, a veritable salsa of open world shooters had come and gone; what’d been revolutionary in 2005 was been-there now. Plus it’d been months since anyone had seen the game in action and there was no reason to believe it was remotely close to ready. Alan Wake wasn’t just late, it was becoming a joke.

So I can’t say for sure, but my bet is that Microsoft put on its Awfully Stern Voice and told Remedy to ship their god damned game before Ballmer himself made them do it with a claw hammer. Whatever the reason, Alan Wake is a straight up corridor 3PS with a forest standing in for the corridors. And that is the longwinded reason for the complimentary but reserved press, leisurely sales, and why people weren’t as excited about it as they might have been.

Thing is, though, there’s nothing wrong with linear games, and there’s nothing wrong with shooters, and there’s nothing wrong with Alan Wake. While not what it was supposed to be, it is extraordinary, a five out of five. The only problem is bruised anticipation: you gotta get wistful when you consider how freaking awesome it would have been if it had delivered on that original concept.

This is Agent Nightingale. He’s a bigger dick than Alan, if that’s possible.

The Devil’s Double

Hilariously, four months before Alan Wake finally heaved itself out of Remedy’s offices, someone else did deliver on that original concept. I speak, of course, of Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is…

A psychological thriller

Set in the American Pacific Northwest

Specifically Washington state

With a protagonist who might be crazy

Who’s trying to solve a mystery

In a small town filled with weird people

That maybe turn into monsters sometimes

Alan Wake is…

A psychological thriller

Set in the American Pacific Northwest

Specifically Washington state

With a protagonist who might be crazy

Who’s trying to solve a mystery

In a small town filled with weird people

That maybe turn into monsters sometimes

The games could basically be each other, if their very respective essences did not yearn so mournfully for what each missed. Alan Wake has coherence, accessibility, solid mechanics, strong narrative structure, great performances, and cohesion… everything Deadly Premonition lacks. Meanwhile, Deadly Premonition has the open world, the freeform mystery, the independent player choice… all the things Alan Wake was meant to have. Collectively they’d make something remarkable, but until then I’ll say that despite Deadly Premonition’s cult following and many ingenious aspects, it is an ultimately flawed game and Alan Wake isn’t.

Look! Look! I’m pretending to be the axe-wielding Jawa from Deadly Premonition!

Trigger City

It’d be hard to really toe the line of psychological thriller in a video game, particularly one built on an engine like Max-FX, designed for action shooters. To their credit, Remedy didn’t try to shoehorn a slow pace in. Instead they created a product wherein shooty action scenes cushion the whole, like Styrofoam packing peanuts surrounding fragile Faberge globes of character-fueled drama, dialogue, and discovery. The vast majority of Alan Wake plays like a shooter, albeit with the added mechanic of flashlighting away the enemy’s cloak of gloom before you can bust a cap up into their business. Practically speaking that just replaces an “aim” function, so it’s not like you’re in uncharted territory there.

And there is plenty of combat to be had – ranging through dark forests, lumber yards, treefall festooned craggy mountain slopes, Bright Falls’ night-shrouded streets. The Taken attack Alan on cue, usually in groups of three or more. They also seem to pounce if he dawdles in one area too long, adding a level of go-go-go to hunting for manuscript pages. For some reason there are also coffee thermoses scattered around, acting as pointless collectibles of no value, but failing to at least try and gather them left me with a sense that I was somehow playing the game wrong.

Eventually the environment turns against Alan as well, so there’s a fair bit of variety in what you face. Boat hook-packing rednecks wearing shadows like rain slickers would get old if they weren’t broken up by the occasional possessed backhoe or low-flying flock of railroad ties or murder of possessed crows. Combat is generally no harder than medium-rare; ammunition and flashlight batteries are packed into each level like salarymen on a Japanese commuter train. Tactical weapons – chiefly flashbangs and stick flares – are thinner on the ground; plus it takes some practice to learn how these items are best deployed.

Taken, meet road flare.

I found combat most fun on the rare occasions when Alan is not alone, when someone (or at least he is imagining that someone) is out in the night helping him. Not only do these scenes open up the interesting secondary characters like the previously mentioned Sheriff Sarah Breaker and Alan’s agent Barry, they’re also opportunities for occasionally crackling dialogue and one-liners that help alleviate the otherwise unyielding tension that Alan Wake doles out.

Depending on your perspective, the 14-18 hours you spend with Alan Wake could get a little boring by the end. In the video I said it ended “just when I wanted it to;” thinking about it, that’s not really true. I was ready to be done about 2 hours before the game actually wrapped. The final slog drags unnecessarily, and it did make me growl at certain repetitive actions in the combat mechanic. Whenever Taken attack you get a one-second cinematic pullback, useful since it’s often hard to immediately tell the direction they’re coming from. Despite this, Remedy chose to place one Taken right behind Alan practically every single time, meaning they get a cheap shot in no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Between this and the frequency with which you get pinned by environmental assaults late in the game, I was beginning to lose patience, so go forewarned.

In the Forests of the Night

Early on I found myself stopping a lot to stare in awe at the fantastic flashlight effects. The lighting is mostly dynamic, and Remedy’s designers so captured that shroudy nighttime deep-forest haze: not quite fog and more than mist, invisible until pierced by a flashlight beam, at which it illumines with suddenly twisting knots of blue and white vapor that eddy and merge, now transparent, now opaque, and in that strange lambence for the first time you can truly see light – not light once it hits the wall or ground, fulvidly puddling there bereft of all its vigor, but light as it is when it’s going somewhere. Often the flashlight beam will catch and trip on a solid thing like a chair or tree stump and the obstacle will instantly double, its shadow-twin unsheathing itself and slithering up and over and around, growing and shrinking and shearing in its weird dance with the light.

Even the birds are pissed at Alan for taking so long with his next book. They’re all, “we’re crows, let’s go feast on this guy!” Get it? No? Sorry. See, there’s this author who took too long to write a book and the title was… eh, forget it. Not that funny anyway.

Equally awe-inspiring were the environment’s colossal draw distances. The designers take pains to put Alan on top of a lot of bluffs and outcroppings so you can look out across the forest and be gobsmacked by seamless, faraway detail. There’s no question that the MaxFX-3 Engine could have powered an open world. Its performance was silken even when rendering miles of animated, dynamically lit forests.

A handful of brief vehicle segments further imply that at least some technical leftovers of the early open world concept survived. Vehicles usually appear when Alan needs to cross a long distance in a short time. You actually could walk most of them if you wanted to, but with vehicles come powerful Xenon headlights that flambé the Taken right out of their shoes. It’s a small part of the game and no one has really made driving with a mouse and keyboard a responsive or fun thing to do, but it’s a nice break from being on foot.

It all comes together to form a wonderfully immersive experience. Our planet’s vast forests are unique – the dark, whispering, misty, woodlands of the American Pacific Northwest don’t feel the same as Germany’s druidish, black-trunked primeval Fangorns or the dense, towering stands bearding the New England side. The forest and town are just real, real, real.

Everything about this place screams “vacation.”

Remedy’s still Remedy. Show of hands: who at least stopped on their second playthrough of Max Payne 2 and watched all the TV shows? Lords & Ladies?The Adventures of Captain Baseball Bat Boy? Anyone? Just… just me then? Well, those little moments of handcrafted polish are back. Alan frequently comes across TVs blaring old reruns of a show called Night Springs, a Twilight Zone knockoff that was, not incidentally, his first writing job. The late-night radio station combines clues of what’s to come with absolutely riotous call-in segments. Yeah, a game can be a relentless pressure cooker and still have moments of levity.

No Country for Old Men

Remedy is fascinated by aspects of American culture, and I’ve always been fascinated by how deftly they capture them. As an American myself I don’t really think of us as having a culture; indeed, I’m not sure an American developer could do genrefied America quite as well as the Helsinki-based Remedy. Max Payne was a beautifully caricatured noir tale, part hard-boiled 1930s and part wire-fu post-Matrix cop drama. Alan Wake is picket fence horror, small towns with big secrets, Stateside celebrity porn, our culture-by-entertainment, and the stark contrast of American ignorance and American well-meaningness. There’s so much hereto remind us that for all the development problems and all the promise on which it doesn’t deliver, Remedy still has it to make fantastic, gripping work that weaves story and gameplay together more deftly than anyone else in the development arena today.

By the way, Alan Wake didn’t end the way I thought it was going to. I can’t go into detail without spoiling the actual conclusion, but those of you who know me well can probably guess where my thoughts had taken me. I will say, entirely without ego, that the ending I anticipated would have been much better, its superiority outstripped only by the complete impossibility of a publisher allowing it in a video game. If you’re dying to know what I thought the ending would be and why I think it would’ve been so much better, maybe you can goad me into spilling in the comments.

Hello!

If you play the Steam version, as I did, you’ll also get The Signal and The Writer, two solid DLC packs that expand the story past the game’s ending and give more background on key characters. Last year saw the release of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, a quasi-sequel I haven’t played yet. Press indicates that while okay it’s not as good as the source material, so I’m not in a rush.

It would seem that Remedy survived the catastrophic early sales of Alan Wake. The company just moved into a posh new office space and they claim they’re close to announcing their next project – which presumably they’ve been working on secretly for some time. Hopefully this will alleviate the usual years of anticipation we’ve come to expect from the developer. Whether it’ll be Alan Wake 2 or not I can’t say, though I kind of hope it’s not. The story has an end, a pretty good one, and there’s no point in dragging it out. Besides, I’d like to see Remedy finally get behind the wheel of a steamshovel and create something much more ambitious than its usual story-driven shooter. You know, something like a working Deadly Premonition.

My only regret regarding Alan Wake is that I didn’t play it sooner. It reminded me of all the reasons I love Remedy, and why I believe the studio may still achieve the kind of creative influence it deserves. That ideal fusion of story and play is no easy task, with most games that try erring on the side of one to the detriment of the other. Remedy’s games strike a much more perfect balance, and I’ve never been disappointed by their work. Don’t judge Alan Wake for what it could have been, when what it is delivers.

About the author

Tap-Repeatedly Overlord Steerpike is a games industry journalist and consultant. His earliest memories are of video games, and hopes his last memories will be of them as well. He’s a featured monthly columnist with the International Game Developers Association, and is internationally published in an assortment of dull e-Learning texts and less dull gaming publications. He also lectures on games at various universities.

24 Responses to Revisited: Alan Wake

Well, no, I agree with most of this. Alan Wake did have great secondary characters (I thought Barry and his string of Christmas lights were hilarious). It had a fantastic soundtrack and the way it was cut up in to episodic beats was clever. Decent story, pretty solid combat system. It’s extremely polished, polished to a sheen.

Deadly Premonition is the superior game. It’s so vastly superior that I clearly must write a follow-up article to tell you just how right I am about this.

Synonamess Botch03/26/2013

I haven’t finished Alan Wake yet. Should I resist the urge to read this?

@Botch: I think you’ll be okay. No spoilers in this article, aside from a remark that it didn’t end the way I expected it to.

@AJ: Admittedly, I’m pretty geeked for the director’s cut of Deadly Premonition, in which I hope they fix all the mechanical problems the game had. I loved its weirdness and ambition; hated the controls, QTEs, and menu system. What really needs to happen is for Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition to get together and make a baby video game.

I do feel sort of guilty for calling Deadly Premonition flawed when it aspires to so much. I mean, it could have been MUCH worse. It could have been a bad game, and it’s not a bad game. But the incoherence and system problems got to me eventually.

Mostly I knew that some of the Deadly Premonition cult following I mentioned would come down on me for those remarks! 😉

@AJ:
Oh lord, I stopped miles before the end. Not far from the beginning, to be honest. I tend to get distracted by shiny things even when I’m enjoying a game (and I was enjoying Deadly Premonition, despite my complaints) – that was its fate. This is part of the reason I’m excited about the director’s cut. I’m going to take it seriously and do it right and make it happen. It is, in many ways, a completely unique game.

You would do a brilliant review of it. Your perspective and style are suited to defining what it tried to do.

(Hoping this isn’t a double post; the captcha didn’t seem to like the first attempt.)

Mat C03/26/2013

Fantastic reading (and viewing!) as always, Matt.

I really, really liked Alan Wake. Silent Hill 2 is one of my all time favourites, and I certainly feel much of its DNA is shared in Wake. Remedy’s effort is certainly a better Silent Hill game than anything out of Konami this generation. Such a tense and overbearing experience. Were it not for Barry, I might have gone mad myself!

I think Wake is a game which will be remembered more fondly by more people as time goes on. I definitely want to pick up the PC version – which I hear is a significant jump over than on Xbox 360 – and hope more do the same as time goes on. It’s certainly a worthwhile experience and I’m really, really glad it worked out for Remedy in the end.

(Tried to post this yesterday but your new captcha system may have eaten it!)

This is absolutely bang on. I enjoyed Alan Wake a great deal, and only regret not replaying it to hunt down the pages, unpick more of its depth and try out the DLC (which AR’s Dylan has repeatedly told me I must).

Remedy are one of my favourite developers (I’ve played everything from Death Rally onwards) and I’m pleased they did well. I didn’t think to look into what they were up to now, but it’s great that Alan Wake turned into a bit of a sleeper hit. Good for them.

Anyway, I have conflicted feelings about Alan Wake. I didn’t have any special expectation for it (hell, went in somewhat expecting to be disappointed) and wasn’t, exactly; but I wasn’t thrilled. The mystery never drew me in, the horror felt all too trite and vague, and its level design iffy. It’s a game that I’d’ve liked a lot more if it were as much as half the length it is. That, or possibly if I played each episode about a month apart like if it were an episodic release. Though I’m not certain it would’ve kept bringing me back. All the best moments were late, I thought.

For me I was left unimpressed by the storytelling (even if it is above the average for a video game) and uninspired by the design. Its a technically capable, well put-together thing, to be sure, and not bad. It just is.

Reveal Spoiler!

Apparently I’m a pretty dark person who likes nihilistic stories with very unhappy endings, because I’ve been through this with other games too.

Anyway, my theory was that Alan had gone crazy at the beginning and killed Alice himself, throwing her in the lake after their fight about the typewriter. The rest of the game, then, would’ve been confabulation, his mind constructing an elaborate defense/repression mechanism to conceal what he’d done from himself. Everything that occurred from that moment on, I thought, would have gone through a filter – we’d only see what Alan believed to be true, meaning Barry and Sheriff Breaker seeing the darkness and fighting it alongside him would’ve been nothing more than another layer of his delusion.

It seemed like a sort of Sixth Sense-y approach, where the player is given all these clues about reality, but doesn’t actually guess it; and Alan, like dead people in that movie, only sees what he wants to see and doesn’t put the evidence together until the big reveal.

I had some basis for believing this. If you listen closely at the beginning – when he’s outside the cabin after their fight – Alice’s muffled words sound a little like “Alan! Please! Alan, no!” Hearing that, I thought, “he’s not out by the lake, he’s in there hurting Alice.” I also remember a few moments during the game that seemed one-sided, like people were saying one thing but Alan was hearing another. Then there was Agent Nightingale, whose role was never really explained. Delusional people with paranoia often conjure up foes like this, often without much in the way of context.

Plus, Alan was finding manuscript pages that told him what other people were thinking and doing – another classic symptom of paranoid confabulation. So I had some evidence, it’s not like I just go straight for wife-murder in all stories. : )

Overall I feel it would have made for a more dark, shocking story. You do see a lot of this sort of thing in crime novels and thrillers, but not in games. I don’t know if they considered using an idea like this, but even if they had I don’t see their publisher allowing it. That, ultimately, it really was an ancient supernatural darkness-fueled lake-monster was a lot less original and impressive to me than the idea that it was all going on in his mind.

So there you have it! Don’t judge me.

@Mat C – thank you! I agree, I think Alan Wake will be remembered more and more fondly as time goes on. It’s not deathless art or anything, just a really good game – but it got a bum rap when it first came out and too many people overlooked its myriad excellent qualities. I’d still love to see Remedy do something other than a third person corridor shooter, just because with their writing skills it’d be an awesome game, but Alan Wake really stands alongside the Max Paynes in terms of quality.

Per Dix’s comment above, there’s nothing about Alan Wake that will stand the test of time or be analyzed in design courses. It’s a very workaday game, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Well done, technically proficient, fun to play, strong narrative – like a movie you really enjoy but don’t really think about years later.

heddhunter03/30/2013

I. Love. This. Game.

Not that it doesn’t have it’s flaws pointed out by the article and in these comments, they were all true. And it pleases me to say “I don’t care.” I, like Steerpike, was a late comer to the Alan Wake party. First, I never really had high expectations for it to begin with so surpassing that puts it right up there with some of my favs. Really, I haven’t been this impressed or this emotionally invested in a game in quite some time. Secondly, I haven’t been this white-knuckled and toes curled in a while either, not just from the story, but the atmosphere, suspense, and constant bombardment of the Taken with limited weaponry and intentionally clumsy combat system meant to make you really work at your aim and avoidance skills.

To be truthful, I don’t spend a lot of my game-playing time in this genre of game. I have spent time playing Silent Hill 2 and 3 and Resident Evil 4 and 5
(not finishing any of them), so I am not completely ignorant of the genre, but Alan Wake is so very different from them, I feel like it totally stands alone which is always a good thing even if it is not a great game. I know literally nothing about Deadly Premonition, so I may be wrong about that.

Re: the spoiler – yes, that would’ve been a better story than ‘the darkness lake monster wants to swallow everything up and make the world a world of darkness.’ (of course, it also would’ve been Silent Hill 2. Which had a great story)

Like I said either on the forums or the comments of Mat’s review, I loved Alan Wake, my favourite thing I played in 2011 (a year late to it myself) one of the reasons being it was pretty much the most Max Payne-like game since the Max Payne games. Sentence sense good that makes!

I also think, graphically, it is the best looking game on 360 or PS3 (effects and “art direction” whatever that encompasses). I didn’t hear an abundance of talk about just how beautiful it all looked and so I was surprised, delighted whilst playing; so gorgeous it badly made me want to take a PNW Wake-inspired vacation to my very own cabin in the woods. Not a lot of games turn me into a tourist like it did.

Okay AJ, I take back what I said above about Alan Wake being the “superior game” compared to Deadly Premonition. The two are not really comparable.

Having now put in about 13 hours with the DP Director’s Cut I feel much more qualified to judge it fully. I don’t honestly know where I am in the game – at times it seems like I’m one scene away from cracking this case, other moments it seems as though the whole town is in on it and nothing will ever be clear.

I was woefully unfair to it, though. While I didn’t make it far enough into the original to tell for sure, the implication that it’s a “broken” game isn’t correct – it may be ugly and a little clunky, but it works as intended so far as I can tell. What I took as broken aspects are really just facets I wish had been more fully realized. I’m also shocked at how irredeemably dark this game has become. When I wrote about it here and in my impressions I was only a few days into the investigation. Little did I know how disturbing things were about to get… to the point where I’m deeply uncomfortable at times, and afraid of what might happen next if I continue to fail in my investigation. This is a really, really dark game, and the horrors it doesn’t outright provide it strongly implies.

I do wish it were more polished; I do wish it had been able to deliver more fully on that whole “living town” thing, but then, no games really do. They’ll get there eventually. Until then rest comfortably in the knowledge that I’ve changed my tune!

I’ve already started undertaking my Director’s Cut play as well. So I’m sure some writing will be happening. But it IS a slow burn game that you do have to give some time. In particular, some of the acting seems really off at first, but will all make sense later.

I wish my 360 was working, because I’d like to compare the controls. My memory is that they were really difficult. “Getting your ass handed to you by monsters” is how I put it. I’ve either improved dramatically at games in general or the controls are much changed, because I’m a monster-killing demon now.

“Slow burn game” is putting it lightly, but you are right. If I’m more than halfway through, and I think I am, only recently did a lot of the pieces fall into place, particularly as regards several of the main characters (who are, as you say, really really well acted – you just won’t realize it until the subtlety of their motivations is revealed).

My kingdom for a paper map of the town though. I hate that damned mini-map. It is my foe.

Well, the Raincoat Killer is my foe, but the mini-map is definitely an adversary of some sort.

I believe the difference in the controls is primarily that the Director’s Cut plays like “easy mode” in the 360 version. There’s no difficulty modes for “normal” or “hard.” They’ve also removed some of the camera cuts that made navigation confusing.

Andrew07/26/2013

I just finished, I’m glad I played this on Steam. I initially found the combat frustrating with the constant ambushes in cramped spaces, or if they are in open spaces, Alan’s lack of cardiovascular fitness. Eventually I steam rolled though with flash bang’s and flares and what not.
Many times I wanted to explore a bit to look for manuscript pages or coffee thermos but going off trail seemed to start the swirling and howling darkness environmental effects and then ambushes. I think with so much story content tied up manuscripts they should not have hidden them.
One thing I was waiting for that never happened was a boss showdown with some tar monster from the bottom of the lake that was leaving those patches of damaging liquid darkness everywhere, I guess it was just scum spit up by the lake.
I definitely enjoyed the game more when joined by Barry or Sarah as the constant horror is quite stressful – if you have ever played Amnesia and needed to take a break you know what I mean.